Danny Bowien, Jeff Chanchaleune and Kevin Lee dream big, talk shop

Over the weekend, celebrity chef Danny Bowien stood before his hometown of Oklahoma City, light a few Mission Chinese restaurants but flanked by a new cookbook.

He was a little nervous before the event but received a familial welcome home — somewhere between conquering hero and weary prodigal.

Flanked by stacks of his new book, "Mission Vegan (Ecco), the Westmoore graduate greeted a steady stream of fans Saturday afternoon at Lee's Sandwiches, clad in white Crocs, loose denim pants, and a Batman t-shirt in honor of National Batman Day.

Just more than a decade ago, Bowien swooped into Gotham by way of San Francisco to expand Mission Chinese coast-to-coast. Mission grew into three restaurants and his first cookbook, "The Mission Chinese Cookbook."

He became a familiar face on the late-night talk show circuit and a star on season six of Netflix's "The Mind of a Chef."

But today, the New York restaurants have closed, and Bowien at the age of 40, is at a crossroads. During the pandemic the Mission world began to crack and fissures grew as Bowien spent less time in the kitchen and the fall reached rock bottom. The original Mission in San Francisco still operates, but he isn't affiliated with it.

Bowien swears his days as a restaurant operator are over, but he's bullish on the future. He embraces changes to the food-service industry and the evolution and expansion of opportunities for creatives who choose the culinary arts as their path.

Saturday's event wasn't his first at Lee's Sandwiches. Over the years, he's hosted pop-ups there and at Ludivine and Chick N Beer. Each time, lines reached out the door and the food sold out in a blink. On Saturday, Lee's made a special combo box of their food with sauces made from Danny's book.

The weekend book-signing was less chaotic than previous visits. Instead of rushing through a clamoring crowd, Bowien had time to swap hugs and stories with high school friends and pose for pictures with a throng less desperate and a little more adoring than usual.

On Sunday, Bowien met with local chefs Kevin Lee and Jeff Chanchaleune, who are balancing restaurant ownership with brands breathing helium. Seated in the heart of an Asian District borne out of the fall of Saigon, two Korean kids and another from Laos met over cold brew for hot takes.

While Bowien, 40, is only three years older than Lee and Chanchaleune, his career has been a whirlwind reaching the highest peaks of the culinary world.

Chanchaleune hosted Bowien Saturday night for dinner at his Ma Der Lao Kitchen, which has taken the national food scene by storm — or at least the East Coast. On Monday, The New York Times released its list of the Top 50 restaurants in the United States and it, like the Bon Appetit Top 50 from last week, included Ma Der.

Chanchaleune earned a Best Chef Southwest nomination from the James Beard Foundation back in 2019 for his work at Goro Ramen and Izakaya. The 2020 Award Show was canceled by the pandemic, but Chanchaleune has got to hope Ma Der landing on two lists that prestigious will garner another.

On Sunday, he and Lee, who turned victories on Food Network into Birdies Fried Chicken earlier this year, lapped up Bowien's every syllable. That included an oath his days as a restaurateur are over.

"I"m not good at it," he laughed. "It took me owning a few to figure that out. Look, I'm still pretty good at making food taste good, and I like to talk about food, travel places to talk about food or cook food for people. I'm just no good at PNLs and stuff like that."

Bowien represents the ongoing evolution of the landscape where culinary creatives ply their trade. Like local chef Gabriel Lewis, Bowien is finding ways to make a living without a restaurant. That means freedom for Bowien. Freedom to travel and freedom to share different culinary points of view.

"I'll never own a restaurant again," he assured Lee and Chanchaleune with a wry smile. "But I'm completely down to do collaborations or even consult under the right circumstances. I'm always looking for excuses to travel to Oklahoma."

Lee was relieved to hear someone with so much success had weaknesses.

"I'll admit it, owning a restaurant is even harder than I thought it was going to be," said Lee, who opened Birdies in the spring. "And I thought it was gonna be the hardest thing I ever did. Just hearing you talk about the struggle and being able to laugh about it, that really helps."

Bowien asked Lee what it was like living in Korea as a little boy. They talked about Korean pizza and its propensity to be sweet thanks to the addition of sweet potato to the dough crust.

“So they like, make pizza dough and they'll like, take sweet potato puree and pipe it on in the middle so you get like this second crust on top and it’s sweet,” Bowien explained. “And there's like corn on it."

“All Korean food is sweet,” Lee laughed. “We put sugar in everything.”

While Bowien and Lee share Korean heritage, cooking on TV and a connection to Oklahoma City, their upbringings were nothing alike. Lee was born in Oklahoma City but raised here, there and everywhere, including Korea and the Pacific Northwest.

Bowien was adopted by an Anglo family from Oklahoma City and raised on white bread sandwiches and Tex-Mex on the weekends. While that journey gave him a truly unique narrative to follow as a young chef (who was more interested in beating drums than egg yolks), it also led to some of his greatest professional fears.

“That’s the the scary thing about doing Korean food,” he said. "My biggest fear is fear of rejection, you know. Not growing up in a Korean household or really even with much Korean community, I just wanted to know if an old Korean grandmother would feel like what I was doing is OK. I'm still just terrified that Koreans won’t like what I make.”

That led Bowien to ask Chanchaleune about his Lao heritage and how it affects his cooking.

Chanchaleune, who was born to Laotian parents, hasn't yet ventured to Laos, which he said gives him similar anxiety.

“I have the same feeling, like is it gonna be good enough for Laotians,” he said of cooking at Ma Der. “Am I gonna make the community proud? Like, this place (Ma Der) reminds me of my grandmother, you know. That more than anything is why I wanted it to work out. But yeah, you know, we've had people come in from outside the market because they can't get this food in their the city. It's been nice.”

By the end of the couple-hour conversation, the congregation of talented culinary minds felt more like a launch party than polite praise and admiration.

"This feels like the start of something," Bowien said with a broad smile, which Lee and Chanchaleune affirmed with laughter and handshakes.

Whether the trio delivers on the promise of the afternoon's confab is up to fate now, but on a sunny Sunday afternoon in Oklahoma City, three of its sons dreamed big and dreamed delicious on its behalf.

This article originally appeared on Oklahoman: Celebrity chef Danny Bowien spends weekend at home in OKC